Centralized, large-scale battery storage has been introduced on the utility side of the grid to provide an alternative to inefficient fast-response gas peaker plants and as a resource for ensuring that excess energy produced, for example during off-peak periods, is not wasted. For instance, commonly, where the over production of energy occurs, energy is typically sent to ground and therefore wasted. Centralized, grid-size battery storage has been advanced as a possible solution to this problem. Particularly, grid side, centralized battery storage is an attempt to mimic supply traditionally provided by the aforementioned gas fired peaker plants, so as to store a reserve of energy in instances where generation plants over produce. This stored supply can then be offloaded as part of the strategy for creating a stable grid. Centralized storage has also been integrated into the system to compensate for the intermittent nature of renewable energy production. Accordingly, grid side, centralized battery storage is an attempt to mimic a traditional hub and spoke grid system.
However, due partly to the fact that the battery storage resides on the utility side of the meter, this model is very inefficient for batteries. For instance, centralized battery storage only allows the utility system operators (e.g., generation, transmission, and/or distribution operators) to propagate several of the main issues with the grid, such as: congestion, inefficiency due to the separation between production and consumption, high costs, and long timelines due to large scale infrastructure and skilled resources and single use-case products. It also continues to ignore consumers and their assets as being part of the solution.
Further, such battery systems are industrial sized, occupying huge warehouses of space. Specifically, because of their large size the batteries themselves are difficult to control, and very hard to maintain. It is easy for individual energy storage cells to become unbalanced, thus causing the battery as a whole to malfunction and/or suffer a diminution in capacity. Further still, given the inefficiencies inherent to peaker plants, large-scale, industrial batteries cannot be offloaded as quickly as needed for them to act as a reserve. Consequently, such batteries become fully charged and are not able to be fully discharged before they are needed to be charged again, and thus they have been found to be ineffectual at solving the problems they were designed to ameliorate.
Additionally, centralized battery storage only allows the DSO to react to demand events, that build up slowly, but change rapidly, requiring fine control that simply is not possible given the lack of control mechanisms to fluidly regulate the functioning of such large batteries. Furthermore, such batteries store electricity at an overall loss due to conversion from AC (transmission) to DC (storage) and back again. This loss is increased when transmission is also part of the equation. And, to make matters worse, these industrialized batteries at best only marginally solve a small portion of the overall problem of efficient energy management, as they do nothing to address the bidirectional flow from customer side Distributed Energy Resources (such as rooftop solar and/or wind turbine generation).
Moreover, such centralized battery storage systems are relatively large and expensive, not easily scalable, and must be managed by an army of highly trained technical staff. It would be desirable to have a less expensive, scalable, more flexible, and easy to control energy storage and distribution system, where congestion is relieved, inefficiency due to the separation between generation and consumption removed, costs and a lack of rapid scalability due to infrastructure and skilled resource diminished and multiple use-cases enabled. It would further be desirable to have a distributed, consumer side, smart energy storage system such as for providing cost efficient energy storage to a household property or building that can be easily installed by a user.
Particularly, to the extent that consumer side distributed battery storage systems have been recognized as a possible solution to the above, such solutions have been proffered specifically as an adjunct to consumer side power generation, for instance, where over-production during the day is stored and used to feedback on to the macro-grid at night. Such solutions require an electrician to wire the power generator and/or the adjunct battery storage unit directly into the meter and/or grid. In such instances, the battery storage unit is not truly a consumer side resource, and cannot be called upon to directly meet the energy needs of the consumer's residence or business. It would be desirable, therefore, to have a true, consumer side energy storage system that was simply “plug-and-play”, such as where an energy storage unit could be provided, easily coupled to the local electrical circuit, e.g., merely by plugging it in to an outlet, and thereby fully capable of providing distributed energy storage that can readily be called on to supply the energy needs of the home or business. It would also desirable to be able to add energy storage units to the system and scale up energy supply that can be provided in a more curvilinear fashion as needed. The smart energy storage assets, systems, and their methods of use herein provided solve these and other such problems.